Wilderness Car Wash

Just what Crystal Falls needs — a ²⁴⁄₇ automatic car wash, right on the main stretch of US2/​141 in town! With all the dust and sand kicked up on the backroads and dirt roads, the insect guts splattered on your car after a drive through the woodlands, you absolutely need to get it clean.
Reminds me of the year I had an unusually large grasshopper wedged upright in the front emblem of my Mercury van. We drove around nearly an entire week with this huge bug for a hood ornament, its legs raised high like a noble steed wounded in battle. Made the front of my Mercury mini-​van look more like a Jaguar or Rolls Royce, except it was brownish-​green and probably well-​baked from the hot sun.
The car wash is very nice too, with a flower bed on the side and a collection of animal figures like a raccoon and moose off to the side. Anyway, the car wash works like this. You pull up to a payment box and put in your money, $ 6 to be exact. It even accepts credit cards or you can order car wash tokens online! Pretty hi-​tech for this part of the country.
A series of instructions on a computer screen tell you to move forward and then stop. A robotic arm with a high-​pressure sprayer emerges and thoroughly blasts the vehicle with water. Then it gets showered with soap, scrubbed clean with roller brushes, all while the vehicle stands still. A final rinse from the robot arm, and you move up to the exit area where blowers dry off your vehicle. A timer counts down till the blowers stop, at which point you drive out, all sparkly clean.